Tag: safari

Google loses over privacy settings

Posted on March 27, 2015 by - News

330ogleThe UK Court of Appeal has turned down an attempt by Google to overthrow a previous verdict that allowed people to sue it over privacy settings.

The case, according to the BBC, centres around allegations that Google got round security settings on the Apple Safari browser and threw advertising cookies on people’s websites to advertise stuff.

Google said it wasn’t pleased with the court’s decision. It had attempted to get the courts to prevent peole suing it because it claims people didn’t suffer financially.

But the judges said that the allegations raise serious problems which do merit a trial.

They continued: “The case relates to the anxiety and distress this intrusion upon autonomy has caused. They concern what is alleged to have been the secret and blanket tracking and coalition of information.”

Google’s motto is it does no evil. It claims it hasn’t done anything wrong.

But the US Federal Trade Commission has already fined Google $40 million, while 38 US states also fined the search giant.

Internet Explorer still popular, shock

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

shockData gathered by Net Applications has revealed that despite the domination of press by its rivals, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular browser.

Microsoft’s product accounts for almost 60 percent of the market and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Chrome, which is IE’s main rival, has been expanding its reach and has grown to 21 percent up from 19 percent just a month earlier. That growth has mainly been at the expense of Firefox, which now accounts for only 14 percent, down from around 20 per cent a year earlier. Finally, Safari is holding steady at the five percent mark while other browsers are also slowly declining in usage.

Internet Explorer IE 8, which is the default browser in Windows 7, has slowly gained users and now accounts for over 22 percent of the market.

Newer versions of the browser, such as 10 and 11 have declined in numbers. IE 11, the current browser version only accounts for 17 percent.

As Internet Explorer 12 coming as part of Windows 10, formerly known as Windows 9, Microsoft may soon find itself in a situation where it’s desperately trying to get its users to upgrade.

Also it is telling that the impact of mobile browser use is negligible – both Apple and Chrome do not seem to benefit much from a “mobile effect” on the figures.

 

Google serves up tat

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

telescopeSearch engine Google has come up with a novel way of getting people to update their browsers to something a little more recent.

Users of browsers which can remember the use of shoulder pads and Duran Duran are suddenly getting served up search results which are just as old.

An Opera 12.17 user complained on a Google help desk that, Google’s homepage reverted to the old version him. If he searched for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seemed to affect only the Google homepage and image search. However he still got the latest news.

Opera is currently using version 24, version 12 was bought out in June 7, 2011.

A Google spokesman said that there was not a fault with Google, in fact it was proof that the “encouragement” to upgrade was working perfectly. He suggested politely that if the user wanted a modern Google they should run a modern browser to support it.

“We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers — they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall,” the spokesman wrote on the thread.

Strangely, the help desk thread continued with people using old browsers insisting that there must be a fault with Google’s programming. After all, there was nothing wrong with working with the same version of Safari which was blessed by Steve Jobs while he was young and healthy is there?